‘Smaller Citizens: Writings on the Making of Indian Citizens’ review: The crisis in education
The Hindu
Krishna Kumar highlights the disparities that exist in the system: gender, caste, class, and the urban-rural gap, and also casts a light on how schools treat their youngest citizens
As we celebrate another Children’s Day in a pandemic year, it is worth reflecting on how we regard children and how we have treated them. The pandemic has been especially difficult on our youngest citizens. Existing disparities have deepened. A section of children has been pushed out of the path of formal education, into forced labour or child marriage.
Children from poor families have missed school meals. Children with disabilities have faced greater challenges. As far as the return to schools, conversations are so preoccupied with the metaphor of “catching up” that they forget that education was never supposed to be a race. Even where children have returned to schools, the well-meaning idiom of “learning loss” has treated them as passive vessels to receive information from textbooks and teachers, rather than as individuals who have agency and are co-creators of their own understanding of the world.